Tourist Arrivals are Expected to Increase During Upcoming High Season

The high season for tourist arrivals this year is expected to perform well, although not at pre-pandemic levels.  Notwithstanding the impact of Hurricane Lisa, every effort is being made in the travel and leisure sector to rebound from the damage caused by the natural disaster.  According to Chief Executive Officer Nicole Usher-Solano, the high season which commences later this month will see spikes in overnight and cruise tourism arrivals.

Nicole Usher-Solano

Nicole Usher-Solano, C.E.O., Ministry of Tourism

“Thankfully, the tourism industry has been showing a strong rebound since COVID because, as you know, we’re still in recovery mode and we’re still not back to 2019 levels.  So, we are seeing that number getting back to a hundred percent of pre-COVID.  The hurricane obviously didn’t help us because it kind of set us back a little bit.  But we do see, and the response from the private sector is that we expect a strong high season.  So that should begin towards the end of November, around Thanksgiving and then run us through to the new year.  So we expect that we will have a strong high season, definitely.  Our airlift is back, you will see, that was one of the things from the hurricane, you will notice that the airport was opened the day after.  On Thursday, we had that open and just to mention a couple other things, you know, in preparing for cruise, I don’t know if you noticed the arches that were down out there.  We had the Ministry of Infrastructure Development [and Housing] working along with the city council.  Everybody really got on the ground to make sure that those debris were moved out of the way so that we could move forward.”